She heard it once from someone, she can’t remember who, that the day after you turn sixty-years-old you can actually see it physically. That person was right. Her left eyelid is drooping slightly more, and there it is, that liver spot grazing the side of her cheek right in front of her earlobe, today darker with more rugged edges ready to blossom and multiply. She hopes that they will look like freckles. She had not minded the sag in her breasts since the two decades that they lost their eagerness to stay perky, but today they finally feel empty and retired, as they should have since years now. They challenged time for so long for her sake, she thought to herself with a chuckle.
She ate so much cake last night and yet, the years have been eating away her hips faster than her consumption of fat can keep up with. This morning, she realizes that the years took a large bite off of her curves. She looks straight, sexless, with no role attached to her aside from feeding the dog and switching the coffee machine on while she showers in her blue-veined marble bathroom.
She feels that now she will be given a break and exonerated for her own contradictions, she will begin to look physically old for anyone to have expectations from her. Her aging face and body will justify her strange way of loving unconditionally. Everyone listens to old people. Everyone forgives them for relinquishing their roles. It excites her more than it scares her, this hiding behind her physical age.
From today on, her beauty will officially resort to just a mere sparkle of her eyes, which others will take for passive wisdom rather than lively mischief. All the better. They would judge her immortal youth otherwise, being a sincere lover in life and all, as they sometimes can’t help but do. She can hear her fourth husband snore in his sleep and she smiles, smoothing the back of her hand on not her own cheek, but the cheek of the melting version of the woman in the mirror. “You did well”, she tells herself, “You did very, very well”, she repeats again, with a proud, surprised and relieved grunt.
In her sixtieth year of living, she is ready to walk out again for it takes too much gut to stay put and feel each stiff stride on this very path all the way through till the end. It is time to love anew so that she may love slightly less, and be “in love” slightly more, as all new loves begin.
It is time to do something again about never falling into the trap of her extreme way of giving her all like she did when she procreated her two children. She was, and is, not as normal as others, whatever normal was. She felt too much love towards her children, their fathers, her lovers, her husbands… and her students. She had to continuously distance herself from them and break her heart throughout her life, as well as the hearts of others, to restart the time consuming distracting process of falling in love with them all over again, staying still pained her. All this drama and catharsis is because she’s simply afraid to say goodbye.
Did you ever meet someone this afraid of one unchanging, committed love, the typical type that dies with linear time? For instance, the same man alone could never handle her mastering ability of getting to know him over and over again. They all did not like how she kept bending along their turns, never letting them grow apart and alone, never lingering back with her expectations of “who he was, and what he has sadly become”.
She was just as excited as all of her husbands were when each strayed to find another faction of himself in the arms of others, be them human or not.
She enjoyed watching them all fall in and out of love with notions other than the fixed notion of her. Why? Because they affirmed that there is no fixed notion of her, or of anyone. There is not even a fixed notion of fixed things like love or time. I told you she wasn’t normal. She loved her honest, non-loyal, ever-changing men. They made her universal, if such a being exists. Whether these many men resided in one man’s body, or whether they were actually many different lovers; she leaves it to you to guess.
She always thought it perfectly natural to stray and her reasons were simple: she basically understood that people are travelers by nature, dynamic in their thoughts, limitless in their compassion. Tying them to roles limits their true potential. It was a simple fact that she did not bother denying for the sake of her own sanity. She was no fool. Hell, she does not even trust her own feet even when she nails them to the ground.
And so, she is ready to walk out again. On the same man who became four different versions? Or on her four entirely different husbands? She leaves it to you to decide, she leaves the judgment of her character and coyness to you.
The point is: now that she thinks of it, she thought she would be ready to leave him again, or get to know another sort of ‘him’, yet again. But she does not feel that transcendental transitory urge to take flight as she usually does. Is this what they call getting old?
For the first time this morning after her sixtieth birthday, the droopy left eye, the liver spot, and the faltering flop of her femininity is making her feel physically tired – not particularly ugly, or unattractive, for she knows her magic is ageless inside the shell of her body and moderately imaginable only through the chords of her voice. But her back aches, and there are too many sentiments to pack up. After all, they keep accumulating with age, don’t they? Besides, her fourth husband recently redid the landscape in front of the house; she has so many seeds to plant and so much to look forward to when the time comes for the flowers to bloom.
She is particularly looking forward to plant the thyroid-supporting green peppers, the immune boosting Echinacea flower, and the pleasurable shiny azaleas. She suddenly remarks that she never thought of azaleas since college, when a Persian student scotch-taped some of them on her friend’s dorm room door for her birthday with a note that said, “Enjoy these red azaleas, they glow in the dark! – A.” She had always wanted to repeat that gesture for someone else, but it has been forty years since that thought visited her, and she had her current, and possibly last, husband to thank for refreshing that “want” buried in her chest under her melting skin, allowing it to glow in the dark.
What will she do now? Expertly, she sets her anxiety aside and stands on her head in a yogic pose. Upside down, the world makes more sense. Her husband’s snoring now sounds like the stretching of a ship ready to take sail. She finally decides that after this one last time of adventure, she will stay. In this ultimate once in her life, she will accept the process of love and see to it until the end. She has trained herself for when this day comes. This is just the beginning.
She feels a skip and then a flutter in her heart that the doctors contributed to a deficiency of the B-Vitamin Niacin, but which she always doubtlessly knew to be her cue for the moment that the great reveal of her gutsy unflinching confrontation to the process will take place. That wretched process which makes one committed for only the core part of only one person, with all of one’s heart: A maddening, unfair, beautiful process.
She is now packed, geared up, and ready to confront it. She will have to learn how to properly word “a goodbye” to a one same lover if need be – or to feel it wordlessly. No matter what, she must be fearless to its destruction of her. She must love with all of its possessive pain like others do. It helps that she is sagging, that her body is literally expiring, the touch of her skin less smooth, yet softer than ever underneath the folds where it is more protected.
It is exciting, to love this way for the very first time. It is just as exciting as getting your heart broken at the age of thirteen and finding a new boyfriend to mend the pain. It is just as stimulating as having an affair with someone else, and growing apart from the person you love, just so that you may shine under his or her touch again. She knew that already. But she saved it for the very last quarter of her life: This love unaltered, this grand finale, this monumental imposing of a new beginning. She woke her fifth husband up, to meet him over breakfast for the first and final time. Life has been painlessly good, but now it will finally start happening.
*cutout by Henri Matisse, “Le Chevelure”, Flying Hair Nude
by Beisan A. Alshafei
February, 2019
Beisan's Burble 